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Rattlesnake Ledge, redux

posted September 23rd, 2012 in Trip reports

I decided yesterday that I should go hiking somewhere, partly because I’m rapidly running out of “good” weekends to hike and partly to start to scope out the foliage in the area. I didn’t make this decision until fairly late in the afternoon though, which limited my options to somewhere fairly close by and not too long. I decided I would give Rattlesnake Ledge another go — I’d hiked it back around early March and got rained/sleeted/snowed on, so it couldn’t be any worse.

It wasn’t much better, either, except for being about 15 or 20 degrees warmer. I woke to rain in Redmond, but by the afternoon it had started to clear up enough that I could at least see some blue in the sky. As it turns out, the clouds had not blown away as much over around North Bend. It misted and sprinkled on me on the way up, along with rain falling off of the trees, but nothing heavy. When I got to the top, it was still completely wrapped in fog:

…although the fog did lift enough to see back down to the lake before I left. There were a couple squirrels and one chipmunk running around begging food from the other hikers; even on a lousy weather day, it was a fairly popular hike.

The worst of the hike was a group of people who haven’t been lectured enough on trail etiquette, which I guess is a downside of hiking a popular, accessible, “relatively” easy trail. It’s a fairly narrow trail for most of the hike, which means there are not many good places to pass; I got stuck behind a group of three people walking in a V formation to take up the whole trail. They looked back at me several times and showed no interest in forming into a single line or pulling over to the side to let me by. Oh well, I eventually found a way past them, sped on to the top, and passed them about a quarter mile from the top as I was heading back down.